The past is a bucket of ashes

Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.

My first stringed instrument was a cigar box banjo where I cut and turned the pegs and strung the wires myself.

I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out.

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.

Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong and the final decisions are made in silent rooms. Tell him to be different from other people if it comes natural and easy being different. Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives. Let him seek deep for where he is a born natural. Then he may understand Shakespeare and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov, Michael Faraday and free imaginations Bringing changes into a world resenting change. He will be lonely enough to have time for the work he knows as his own.